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THE GALIS OF Banaras are great levellers. Since they are too narrow for cars, the rich as well as the poor either use two-wheelers or just walk through them. In which other city can you imagine two doctors—both highly qualified, mid-career and hailing from prosperous families—roaming on a scooter without giving a damn what people think?
‘Every single—I repeat, every single—circle of friends will include people who are rich as well as those who don’t count as rich—that’s the specialty of Banaras. A professor can be friends with a shopkeeper, a doctor can be friends with a priest, there is no distinction—unlike in bigger cities where professors only mingle with professors and doctors mingle only with other doctors.
‘The ancient texts about Kashi say, “Maranam mangalam yatro”, which means “Death is auspicious.”
About Kashi it is also said, “Kashiyam maranam mukti”, which means if you die in Kashi, you are liberated.
Yahaan, shav bhi Shankar hai (here, even a dead body is considered to be Shiva).’
the sinner from Banaras will go to heaven because his good deeds in his previous lifetimes in other cities far outweighed the sins he had committed as a Banarasi. That’s why God had placed him in Banaras in the first place, so that he could be rewarded.
THE VAST SWEEP of land fed by the Ganga is liberally sprinkled with four-legged wooden stalls that are integral to the culture thriving on these plains. They are the paan shops—if you remove them, you will be taking the flavour out of the culture.
Maghai leaf, which begins growing in the month of Magha (mid-January to mid-February) and is available for three months.
ASSI IS A Banaras within Banaras—more Banaras than the rest of Banaras.
THERE ARE—NOT surprisingly—many things Vishwanath in Banaras.
Reputations are rarely built through publicity but always through word of mouth.
Is God more likely to listen to you if you stand in a queue for hours on an auspicious day for just a fraction-of-a-second glimpse of him than if you walk into a deserted wayside temple for a prolonged one-on-one audience with him on any slow day of the year?
‘You can buy food but you cannot buy appetite’; ‘you can buy a bed but you
cannot buy sleep’; ‘you can buy pleasures but you cannot buy happiness’.
Jerome Armstrong,
In my experience, the true flavour of a place reveals itself only after the crowd is gone; but if that realisation dawns on every single person in the crowd, then a place would be crowded at all times.
VERY FEW THINGS in the world happen with the same precision as the sunrise. Yet no two sunrises are the same. The weather, the location, whether you are alone or have company, if you have company then what kind of company, your state of mind—these are some of the factors that decide the quality of a sunrise.
Entitlement is only a notion, experience is real.
framing the camera is akin to framing the mind. Even in a crowd, you can be alone, and even in noise, there can be calm.
In Banaras, no one preaches to you. You learn from its pyres and its people. The pyres tell you that no matter who you are, you aren’t ultimately worth more than a heap of ash. And its people show you that since you are anyway going to be a heap of ash someday, you might as well be happy. And the easiest way to be happy—as the retired peon I once met at the akhara taught me—is to be satisfied with whatever little comes your way.
The thandai is as integral to the life of a prototypical Banarasi as tea.
